Max Cavitch joined Penn's faculty in 1999, after receiving his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Rutgers. He teaches courses on American and Anglophone literature of the modern period and on Psychoanalytic Studies. His teaching and research interests also include Animal Studies, Cinema and New Media Studies, Comparative Literature, Poetry and Poetics, and Gender and Sexuality studies. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minnesota 2007), Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present (Routledge 2025), and dozens of essays, articles, poems, and translations in journals including American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Grand, Modern Language Quarterly, Oxford Literary Review, Philosophical Salon, Politics/Letters, PMLA, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Senses of Cinema, Screen, and Victorian Poetry. He is also the editor of Walt Whitman's Specimen Days (Oxford 2023) co-editor (with Brian Connolly) of Situation Critical! Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies (Duke 2024), and co-translator (with Noura Wedell and Paul Grant) of Jean Louis Schefer's L'homme ordinaire du cinéma [The Ordinary Man of Cinema] (MIT 2016). He is the founding editor of the blog, Psyche on Campus, which won the 2022 Award for Excellence in Journalism from the American Psychoanalytic Association. His book Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance is forthcoming from Punctum Books in 2026, and he is currently completing two new scholarly monographs: Passing Resemblances: World Autobiography and the Complicity of Reading from Nehemiah to Knausgaard (under contract with Columbia University Press) and Fido and Psyche: Dogs In and Around Psychoanalysis, 1871 to the Present: An Illustrated History. He has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Science History Institute, the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, Mesa Refuge, the Penn Humanities Forum, Cornell's Society for the Humanities, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Austen Riggs Center. He is Co-director of Penn's Psychoanalytic Studies program, a founding member of the Historical Poetics group, a member of the Advisory Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, a consortium member of the Project on Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, a member of the collaboration committee of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and Penn's Department of Psychiatry, and an affiliated faculty member of the programs in Cinema and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies.

Web: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/index.html

Psyche on Campus (blog): https://web.sas.upenn.edu/psycheoncampus/

Photography: https://www.instagram.com/maxcavitchphoto/; https://www.inliquid.org/artist/cavitch-max